Robert Bradshaw, 15.04.2012 07:59:
> On Sat, Apr 14, 2012 at 2:00 PM, mark florisson wrote:
>> There may be a lot of promotion/demotion (you likely only want the
>> former) combinations, especially for multiple arguments, so perhaps it
>> makes sense to limit ourselves a bit. For instance for numeric scalar
>> argument types we could limit to long (and the unsigned counterparts),
>> double and double complex.
>>>> So char, short and int scalars will be
>> promoted to long, float to double and float complex to double complex.
>> Anything bigger, like long long etc will be matched specifically.
>> Promotions and associated demotions if necessary in the callee should
>> be fairly cheap compared to checking all combinations or going through
>> the python layer.
>> True, though this could be a convention rather than a requirement of
> the spec. Long vs. < long seems natural, but are there any systems
> where (scalar) float still has an advantage over double?
>> Of course pointers like float* vs double* can't be promoted, so we
> would still need this kind of type declaration.
Yes, passing data sets as C arrays requires proper knowledge about their
memory layout on both sides.
OTOH, we are talking about functions that would otherwise be called through
Python, so this could only apply for buffers anyway. So why not require a
Py_buffer* as argument for them?
Stefan